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Celebrating 5 years!

5 Years of Us!

You'll be able to find all our 5-year celebrations up here. There's going to be some great stuff.

Episode Four

Time of the Angels

Five years of Doctor Who...

Five years caught in our documentry...

Five years of Games of the Year...

Five years of KNTV...

Five years of the forums...

Hands up if you where slightly sceptic when you heard the Weeping Angels where returning. Yup, we thought so. Blink was one of the most successful episodes of Doctor Who ever, as shown when it was voted No. 2 in Doctor Who Magazine’s ‘Greatest Episode Ever’ poll. However, the episode ran on one thing: Surprise. We knew nothing about the angels, we knew nothing about Sally, and we knew nothing about the haunted house the two meet in. The episode was built around the revelations that take place around the 30-mintue mark, as we discover the true nature of the Lonely Assassins and just why we shouldn’t blink. Second viewings are simply to marvel in the way the episode was crafted, and the humour that we missed the first time when those stone statues where scaring the beejebus out of us. However, the villains don’t quite work in the same way once you know what a Quantum-Lock is, so how was Steven Moffat going to make a new plot out of a villain that seemed tired after one story?

We should know better than to doubt Steven Moffat, though, as he has on countless occasions this season already proved us wrong. The first episode was superb; despite the pre-broadcast critics, Matt Smith defiantly can act and Karen Gillan defiantly knows how to steal the show. And it looks like he’s not going to let us down this time: although this ‘sequel’ to the 2007 thriller has the obvious doubts surrounding it, a quick viewing of the trailer shows how chilling it could be. There’s only so many times you can lock the Doctor in a room with no obvious means of escape, but trapped in a pitch-black maze, surrounded by statues, but out of the thousands, only one has the ability to kill. And for all the Doctor knows, that one is right over his shoulder...

The other important recall from Moffat is that of Alex Kingston as River Song, the beautifully-named archaeologist who we saw die in 2008’s Forest of the Dead. Again, the fun in River was that we knew nothing of her: Was she the Doctor’s wife? Did she really know him? If this delivers the answers to the open-ended tale from two years ago then it could be a very interesting episode, for many a reason.

The other big thing of note is that this is Smith’s first two-part episode, and it doesn’t get much bigger than one of the most terrifying of foes his predecessor faced, but on a far wider scale. If Moffat’s two previous multi-episode Doctor Who stories are anything to go by, expect an epic cliff-hanger that seemingly cannot be resolved, only for the Doctor to flounce his way out of it in the world’s most anti-climatic opening sequence. (Forest of the Dead is the worst culprit here: There just happens to be a secret passageway through the bookcase. Gripping stuff!) However, one of our main criticisms of the first couple of episodes (In particular Victory of the Daleks) was that the episodes moved to fast and tried to pack a little too much into 45 minutes. Perhaps having an hour and a half will help director Adam Smith pack it all in a bit better?

Sceptic or not, we’re certainly excited, and especially since at the time of publishing there’s only a few hours to go until we find out what the Angels did next...